Ubuntu Desktop images available in Hyper-V gallery

Today we’re very pleased to announce that an optimised Ubuntu Desktop image is available from the Hyper-V gallery. This will give an optimum experience when running Ubuntu Desktop as a guest on a Windows 10 Pro desktop host. From the Ubuntu Report data we know that a lot of people are using Ubuntu as a virtual machine, and so we want to make that experience as seamless as possible.

This is probably the most seamless way to run an Ubuntu virtual machine on Windows.

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I’m not much of a tinkerer anymore, but I can still remember way back when, installing Slackware to a spare partition (when it took me a couple of days to get XFree up and running), and compiling QT and KDE 1 from source. Glad to see things are getting easier for folks who want to try something other than Windows. You youngsters don’t know how good you have it now days

I also am guilty of no longer having a dualboot system but rather Oracle VirtualBox running on Win10 with various OSs as guests to that… I would be interested to know the stats of those running Linux as a guest, how many actually ‘use’ the OS for serious work or just play with it.

Maybe when MS roll out there ‘Windows as a service’ more people would think to go back to a physical implementation of Linux, but with Ubuntu now being able to integrate with Windows, and multicore processors and cheap ram everywhere… is Linux heading down that slippery slope and people arn’t noticing?

I do use Ubuntu on Hyper-V for work on a daily basis. While Virtual Box is definitely easier to set-up and has had good guest OS integration for ages, its I/O performance is absolutely awful on Windows. And Oracle does not care about this product any more as it seems they did not find any practical way to monetize it other than their USB adapter voodoo (USB 2/3 usage on Virtual Box is not free for companies).

While their VM bootstrapping tools are neat, indeed, the great new thing is the Enhanced Linux VM ( https://github.com/Microsoft/linux-vm-tools ) thing. So, while Microsoft is still lagging behind in terms of 3D acceleration for guest OSes, the cursor and the typing are not laggy any more; it is now butter-smooth. My god, that is so goooood.

Even multi-screens setups are now supported. And with its unmatched I/O perfs (on Windows 10, as far as I could test), Hyper-V has become really nice especially these days, with Vagrant and Docker being compatible with it too. We now have a serious hypervisor easily accessible to developers and sysops all around the place. It feels less hackish than a year ago when I started using it.

FYI with a manual install of Ubuntu Mate or Ubuntu Cinnamon 18.04 and https://github.com/Microsoft/linux-vm-tools, it does work in full HD, dual screen. No hardware acceleration though and a bit of tweaking is required for the full HD part (kernel boot parameters). With Cinnamon in Software mode, it does work wonderfully, though it is not as fluid as Virtual Box (hardware acceleration does wonders).

I do not know what Desktop Environment they picked for the official Microsoft-provided image, but a default Gnome install would be an awful choice as there is no 3D acceleration.